31 July 2024

Herwig Schopper was Director-General of CERN from 1981 to 1988, during which time the Large Electron Positron collider was approved and constructed

Source || Part 14 of the CERN70 Series

The Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) project was first presented to the CERN Council in ...

11 July 2024

Carlo Rubbia’s name is closely related to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN

Source || Part 13 of the CERN70 Series

In 1983, CERN reached the end of the alphabet when the Laboratory announced the discovery of the long-sought W and Z particles. The announcement was so ...

27 June 2024

Ted Wilson was involved in the design of the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and played a leading role in its commissioning.

Source || Part 12 of the CERN70 Series

In the early 1960s, when the Proton Synchrotron (PS) had just come into service, the scientific community was already ...

13 June 2024

Violette Brisson played an active part in the discovery of neutral currents; she was head of the Gargamelle group at the Laboratory of the École Polytechnique in Paris

Source || Part 11 of the CERN70 Series

It was the first great discovery to be made at CERN. On 19 July 1973, ...

29 May 2024

Kjell Johnsen was the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) project leader when the accelerator was built

Source || Part 10 of the CERN70 Series

On 27 January 1971, the world’s first collisions between two beams of protons occurred in CERN’s Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR). By the ...

16 May 2024

Georges Charpak received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Physics for his 1968 invention of the multi-wire proportional chamber, which revolutionised particle detection

Source || Part 9 of the CERN70 Series

Progress in fundamental particle physics research often relies on developing ever more ...

2 May 2024

Helge Ravn was part of the ISOLDE group from the beginning

When ISOLDE began operations at CERN in 1967, it was unique in the world

Source || Part 8 of the CERN70 Series

When the Isotope Separator On-Line (ISOLDE) began operations at the Synchrocyclotron (SC) in 1967, it was unique in ...

17 April 2024

Paolo Zanella came to the CERN computing group in 1962, just a few years after the first computer had arrived

Source || Part 7 of the CERN70 Series

CERN’s first computer, a huge vacuum-tube Ferranti Mercury, was installed in 1958. It represented the first stage in the evolution of ...

26 March 2024

Madeleine Znoy was one of the people responsible for “scanning” the films from the bubble chambers for interesting events

Source || Part 6 of the CERN70 Series

In the 1960s and 1970s, two techniques for accurately recording the tracks of invisible particles dominated experimental ...

14 March 2024

Francis Farley, a British physicist, joined CERN in 1957. This marked the start of a long and remarkable career in experiments to measure the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon

Source || Part 5 of the CERN70 Series

In the 1950s, the muon was still a complete enigma. Physicists ...